National Signing Day Thoughts

Well, yesterday was National Signing Day, aka Todd is glued to rivals.com all day. I'm kinda obsessed with Rivals.com. It is set as my homepage right now and I check it a ton. For those who don't know, Rivals.com is a sports website that works primarily at reporting, scouting, and projecting the future of prep athletes. The biggest thing that rivals does is rank football recruits, classes, report on where they might go, and uncover a ton of information on soon to be college stars. They don't ever touch personal lives, only report on grades if they are really, really outstanding, and try to stay away from crushing souls, which can happen with athletes at that age. I got hooked on Rivals my junior year of high school, when two guys I went to school with were big time recruits. That was the first class that Rivals evaluated, so it was cool following the progress of those guys as I was still in class with them. Both are playing pro ball now, one was a pro-bowler and now with the Raiders, and the other is in the CFL, so it was cool to know them when.

But here we go, my thoughts on signing day:
2009 Top Classes-
1. Alabama
2. LSU
3. Ohio State
4. USC
5. Texas
6. Florida State
7. Michigan
8. North Carolina
9. Georgia
10. Florida

Now this only shows the projections of which classes will turn out better. Tennessee had to dominating recruiting classes in the last four years and they have stunk. And generally if your team won a national title or were in the title game, you usually dont get a top class, so Florida being top 10 is awesome. We took fewer recruits because we have so many young stars. Several top prospects chose against us because they knew they wouldnt get playing time as freshmen. But our average prospect rating was the highest in the country, so overall, the guys we got were just as good or better than any other school, there just werent as many. And going back and looking at the top recruits from years past is what I did alot yesterday. Here are the top recruits from 2006-
1.Percy Harvin!!!!
2. Andre Smith
3. Chris Wells
4. Gerald McCoy
5. Sergio Kindle
6. Matthew Stafford
7. Vidal Hazelton
8. CJ Spiller
9. Allan Bradford
10. Mitch Mustain
11. Sam Young
12. Myron Rolle
13. Brandon Spikes!!!!
14. Reshad Jones
15.Brandon Graham
16. Taylor Mays
17. Robert Rose
18. Stafon Johnson
19. AJ Wallace
20. Al Woods
21. Ricky Sapp
22. Tim Tebow!!!!

If you follow college football, you will see that most of these guys ended up being studs. Some were major busts(Mitch Mustain, Sergio Kindle). And I stopped at 22 because I wanted to show how far down the list Tim Tebow was. He was considered a once in a lifetime recruit, but a good one. So the rankings dont usually go exact, but they are still pretty dead on, generally.

In other recruiting news, WKU put together their best recruiting class ever. They signed 26 players, 3 of which have no business even going to WKU, because they could have gone to bigger schools. But after you go 2-10(given, they played the toughest non-conference schedule in the country with games against Alabama, Ball State, UK, and Virginia Tech), everybody thinks they can start as a freshman. We scored the best recruiting class in the conference, and will begin our first official bowl eligible D-1 season with a good foundation.

Sorry to the mainly female persuasion who read my blog who dont care one bit about all of this recruiting stuff. But these are Todd's Thoughts.